Kabuga plea to have genocide charges dropped ridiculous

Kabuga was indicted by the now defunct United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), in 1997, on seven counts of: genocide, complicity in genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, persecution and extermination, all in relation to crimes committed during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.

Lawyers for Felcien Kabuga, the alleged financier of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, have asked court to drop charges against him on grounds that he is sick and therefore unfit for trial. Kabuga’s lawyer, Emmanuel Altit, filed a plea at the UN Court’s branch in Arusha-Tanzania, for his client saying that medical reports proved that his 84-year old client cannot stand trial.

According to media reports, Altit indicated that “pursuing the case under these conditions would constitute a serious breach of Felecien Kabuga’s rights and would put into question the fairness of the trial.”

At first, I thought it was a spoof. But then I realized that this lawyer certainly meant it just like all the defence lawyers who do not care much about the plight of genocide victims. This is the worst irresponsible, and callous argument to make for a man accused of the worst crimes against humanity: the genocide of more than one million lives.

As I read through one of the news articles, I found out that Kabuga’s eldest son, Donatien Nshimiyumuremyi, in an interview with AFP declared that his father was physically and mentally unfit for trial. What else can he say? It is his father who the whole family has been helping to evade justice for 27 years.

Kabuga was once one of the few very rich men in Rwanda. He used his financial clout to finance the genocide against the Tutsi where more than one million people were slaughtered. He helped set up the notorious Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), the hate radio nicknamed Radio Machete that spewed hatred against the Tutsi calling them cockroaches and accomplices of the rebels of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which had launched a liberation war in October 1990.

When the mass-killings started, the RTLM was encouraging the killings by revealing where the Tutsi were hiding and it advised the genocidal militia about which methods to use to finish off their victims. 

In 1997 he was indicted by the now defunct International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on seven counts including genocide and crimes against humanity. For more than 26 years, with the discreet support of certain governments and relatives who have remained loyal to him, Kabuga constantly managed to evade justice; from Kenya to the DRC and from Germany to France, via Belgium.

Born in Muniga, in the northern Rwandan prefecture of Byumba, the prosperous, influential, and mysterious businessman was a key cog in the wheel of the regime of Juvénal Habyarimana, who ruled Rwanda from 1973 to 1994. Kabuga was finally arrested in the suburbs of Paris on May 16, 2020. He is now in the custody of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT), waiting for trial.

Asking for Kabuga to be released on such flimsy arguments is rubbing salt into the gaping wounds of genocide survivors. One wonders whether if it were a Nazi fugitive, these lawyers would even dare raise these spurious reasons for letting him off the hook. There are cases in the past when old Nazi fugitives were tried or extradited regardless of their frail conditions.

In February 2021, Friedrich Karl Berger, 95, a former Nazi guard was deported from the US to Germany to face justice for “acts of persecution” after more than 60 years following an investigation into his Nazi past. However, after arriving at Frankfurt airport he did not face trial in Germany because prosecutors there dropped the case against him over lack of evidence.

Contrary to the excuse of  Kabuga’s lawyer, a German court convicted a 93-year-old man for helping the Nazis murder thousands of people while he served as a concentration camp guard more than 75 years ago, in what might be one of the last verdicts to be handed down to a living participant in the Holocaust.

In July 2020, The Hamburg state court found Bruno Dey guilty of 5,230 counts of accessory to murder — one for each person believed to have been killed in the Stutthof concentration camp, east of Gdansk in Poland, during the time he served as a guard there - August 1944 to April 1945.

If a Nazi like Dey, who is older than Kabuga, stood trial for his role in the Holocaust, why should Kabuga be handled with kids gloves? Survivors of the genocide against the Tutsi have waited for too long. The international community failed to prevent or stop the 1994 genocide. It should not fail to provide justice, 27 years later.